Guided Tour of the Three Exhibitions of the Cycle “20 Minutes on the Margin”

At the height of August 2020, a three year old girl riding an inflatable unicorn accidentally drifted out to sea from a beach on a Greek island, carried away by the currents. A ferry eventually spotted her far offshore, still clinging tightly to the float, and she was rescued unharmed. Who has not, at some point, wished to alter the course of the story they have been given to live?

This cycle, curated by Bernat Daviu (Fonteta, 1985), unfolds across three exhibitions conceived as chapters of a collective novel. The works bring together narratives and characters that inhabit the margins: figures who challenge imposed boundaries, question dominant imaginaries and assert themselves in disenchanted or dystopian contexts. Fiction becomes a tool for generating escapist and metaphorical narratives that remain critical of reality, from which a discourse on identity, resistance and memory takes shape.

The three exhibitions in the cycle – “Child’s Play” at Bòlit Rambla, “Right Here Elsewhere” at Bòlit Pou Rodó, and “Maladaptive Daydreaming” at Bòlit Sant Nicolau – share the most subversive spirit of the marginalia. Marginalia – a word from Latin meaning “of the margins” – originally referred to a diverse repertoire of written and, above all, pictorial elements placed in the margins of the pages of Western books during the Middle Ages. Beyond their clarifying function, they offered the copyist a playful or satirical escape route through which to evade the monotony of their task and break with the rigidity of the main text.

Twenty minutes is the time the girl with the unicorn was missing – perhaps not entirely by accident? – at sea. It is also, according to several studies, the average time a visitor spends in an exhibition. The cycle 20 Minutes on the Margin proposes an immersion in dissonant narratives that open up spaces of questioning, displacement and possibility.